


the only bed worth sleeping's the one right next to you

by defiore



Category: Preacher (TV)
Genre: Age Difference, Alternate Universe - After College/University, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Human, Domestic Fluff, Eventual Relationships, Fluff and Angst, Friends to Lovers, M/M, Platonic Relationships, Slow Burn, Time Skips
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-10
Updated: 2018-07-10
Packaged: 2019-06-08 00:49:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15231735
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/defiore/pseuds/defiore
Summary: at a grunge show, an angel and demon fall in love. though, it takes them a while to fully realise it.





	the only bed worth sleeping's the one right next to you

His finger fumbles on the shutter-release button, he hasn’t yet gotten used to using a digital camera. It feels so small and awkward in his hands, maybe even a tad bulky for his taste.

On the front of the tiny gadget was a rainbow Apple logo, and he’s impressed that his school could conjure up enough money to buy five of these for the writers of the school paper. They had to be over five-hundred pounds each, he can’t conjure an image of that much money being spent on a little plastic and metal box.

He holds the viewfinder up to his eye, closing the opposite eye and aiming at a schedule hung on the wall. Before he can click the button and take the photo, the door behind him flings open. The professor who “founded” the paper (really all he did was revamp the pre-existing campus paper and slap his name into the title) barges in, and he lowers the camera, taking his finger off the button.

“Having trouble with the camera, uh—” Professor Doherty typically doesn’t forget names, but he always has to ask him for a refresher. His hand slaps down on his shoulder, patting it as he tries to remember his name.

“Fiore. Weston?” He sets the camera down, deciding he’d decipher it later. Professor Doherty nods, though like clockwork the next time they spoke he’d have to ask again.

He removes his hand from Fiore, walking to the other end of the room and deciding to talk to another student. They chat, and it almost sounds like they were talking about weekend break. While it isn’t really anything, he feels a pang in his chest. He feels awkward just standing there, watching the professor and his peer engaging in such a light conversation while he can’t even manage to get in more than his name.

As more students pour in, taking their spots around the room and waiting for further instruction, Fiore sits down in the back, near the door, holding the camera in his lap.

The professor drones on for twenty minutes, talking about how the last paper had a formatting error and that they had to make sure everything was aligned properly before the paper was sent to the printers. While a few students were eagerly listening, most of them were sat around, barely tuning in to hear what their professor kept harping on about.

However, everyone perks back up when Professor Doherty starts talking about assignments.

“As you know, we have a few events going on around campus this week. Camilla and India will be reporting on mid-terms, Keith will cover the rugby team, Fiore and Maisie will cover the concert at the campus pub, and Rich, James, and Ellie will report the demonstration on Saturday. Is that clear?” He nearly needs to catch his breath, but everyone understands and starts to pour out.

Fiore has no clue who Maisie is, until he sees a girl approach the professor. He decides to go up, uncharacteristically so, and listen in.

She looks disappointed when Fiore enters the conversation, like she’s finally realized who he is.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’d rather do the rugby story with Keith. You don’t need two people covering a garage band at a pub.”

The silence in the room is deafening. It is short, sweet, but it still manages to destroy any semblance of hope that Fiore had of this story going well.

Maisie looks upset, but he isn’t sure if she is upset for him or for herself. He straightens his back, exhaling and looking up at the scene once again. She tries to avoid any eye contact with Fiore, grabbing her wrist with her hand and glancing between the professor and the ground.

Before the professor can interject, Fiore steps away from the conversation, placing the digital camera in its case and throwing it into his backpack. He understands that he’ll have to do the project on his own. It isn’t something that truly upsets him, but he’s disappointed that he’ll have to both take notes on the concert and take pictures throughout the show. He isn’t great at multitasking, and the last thing he needs is to fuck up this assignment.

He rakes his hair off of his forehead with his fingers, looking over to the bulletin board and schedule before heading out of the lab. He has an hour or two to sit in his room and practice using the camera.

* * *

 

An unremarkable hour and a half later, Fiore wanders from flat twenty minutes away to the pub. A few small clusters of people are heading in the same direction, some loners trudging along as well.

The fading sun is folding over into night, and soon only lamplights would illuminate the concrete paths leading back home. He grabs his notebook out of his bag, bringing a pen out from his back pocket and scribbling a few notes about the concert down.

Inside, the pub is warm, dimly-lit and very narrow, making it look very cozy. About thirty students are piled in, and it looks as if the pub can only hold maybe twenty more before it reaches capacity. Around him, several people crowd together, wearing flannel, oversized denim and corduroy trousers, and large stomping boots. Everyone is drowning in their clothing, but Fiore admires how comfortable they look.

The stage is small, and currently concealed with a stained painter’s sheet. Tables had been moved to a back corner of the room, opposite the stage, leaving enough floor space for everyone to gather in front of it. The bartender is flying around the bar, trying to fulfill about six orders at once.

He makes his way to a booth, writing down some quick observations before the show begins. He doesn’t want to stand on the floor with everyone else—he prefers to have his personal space—but he wouldn’t get a good view of the band for the paper, otherwise. Fiore steps cautiously into the crowd, standing tall and thin as he could, taking out the camera and checking it before the lights go out.

The painter’s sheet drops to the floor unceremoniously, in one graceless gesture, and the stage lights up. There stand five people, or more appropriately four, as one is sitting behind a drum set. The crowd starts congregating towards the edge of the stage, squishing and squeezing together. In no time, he is surrounded, crushed in between a few people. The group screams and cheers as a skinny, scantily-clad boy strides to the shiny microphone stand at the front of the stage. He smirks, placing his lips against the microphone.

Without any further hesitation, the man starts wailing into the mic, shrieking about how his ex broke his heart and how she didn't deserve him, anyway. Fiore grimaces at the noise, but he doesn't get the chance to fully appreciate how awful it sounds. The crowd begins to shift, kicking and flailing and bumping into each other.

Fiore is bounced around between a triad of people, getting elbowed in the ribs and shoved roughly into one person beside him. The person glowers, moving away from him and continuing to stand on the sidelines. Fiore tries to squirm his way out of the crowd, but a few people around him push him back in place, just inches away from clear ground.

There is no way he could finish this article while staying in the pub. He tries to plan an escape, manoeuvre away from the thrashing crowd and get back to his flat. He can't find any viable exit, and can't formulate a plan when he's being tossed around and bashed into like a rack of meat on a hook. He's feeling his chest tighten, he can't tell if the first song is over yet, and he's getting his foot stomped on by one of the five people in his direct vicinity.

However, he feels a grip on his arm, followed by a few loose tugs. He looks down, finding a man trying to guide him to the side of the crowd. Fiore complies, and the man shoves the crowd away, releasing him from the rough shoving and foot-crushing. He’s still in the crowd, but the man keeps him on the side, among a cluster of people standing still or bouncing on the balls of their feet.

Fiore attempts to get a look at the man, looking down at his silent saviour. He’s standing, bobbing his head and deflecting shoves and kicks from more than a few people. He looks unaffected, standing and clapping and yelling when the song comes to a close. Fiore can’t even pinpoint if this is the song that started the concert or the second, third, he isn’t sure how long he was being tossed around before he was pulled away.

Every song faded into each other, for a while Fiore blanked out. He could hear a slight change every now and again, but he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just the next part of the song or an entirely new one.

After a long forty minutes, the band leaves the stage. Fiore is shocked back to Earth when the crowd disperses, and he’s left standing beside his bodyguard. The man steps forward, towards the stage. The person behind the drum set jumps off the stage, he looks to have come back specifically to talk to him. They grin at each other, and the drummer slips an arm around the man’s waist.

At that point, Fiore turns on his heel and makes his way out of the pub. He dawdles down the paved path with his bag slung over his shoulder. The air is a bit cool and wet, it had rained during the concert.

A ringing resonates in his ears, he can’t hear his footsteps on the pavement. He had been brought closer to the speakers than he realized, apparently.

Fiore stops when he’s a few paces away from the pub. He doesn’t want to return to the confinement of his flat. He can’t bring himself to go sit in his bed and turn on the tv and watch the news again.

Instead, he decides to take a few notes on the concert, coming up short on what actually happened. On his camera he had one picture, of the crowd scattered around the floor. He never managed to get a picture of the concert itself, further more remember what actually happened during that forty minutes.

There isn’t much to say. He blacked out and now he can’t recall what he even saw.

His concentration on his notepad is distracted when the pub doors fly open. Two people pour out of the pub, scowling at each other.

Fiore can barely hear the yelling, but he can see their faces contort into those appropriate expressions. However, through the blind viewing, he can see that one of the screaming people is the same man from the concert.

His head is fuzzy and hazy, but he does watch the taller, muscular man shove the smaller man and storm off. It’s not until he’s had a moment to brush what just happened off when he turns to see Fiore staring. His eyes are misty and dark, and he shakes his head, trying to cool himself off.

“How was the show?” His voice is tense, low, it sounds like a violin string being pulled tightly, verging on breaking at any moment.

Fiore continues to stare, taking a moment to formulate a decent response.

“It was interesting.” He would have said ‘good,’ but saying that would have been a blatant lie.

The man smiles subtly, his eyes begin to warm up.

“That’s the first concert you’ve ever been to, right?” The man starts to walk in the same direction Fiore is going, so he follows. Even with his shorter legs, he walks quite fast.

Fiore nods quickly, which makes the man grin again.

“Thought so.”

The conversation ends for a few minutes, the man tucks his hands into his coat pockets and keeping his head low as he walks. The cold is getting to him.

Fiore shrugs his coat off of his shoulders, looking down to the man before holding it out.

He doesn’t know why he did it, but when the man takes the coat and wraps it around himself, it makes him smile, just a tiny bit.

“Thanks.” It’s a tiny whisper, his voice is softer than it was earlier. Fiore and the man continue walking, and while he can feel the cold slipping through his jumper and his undershirt, he doesn’t shiver.

The lamps leading to the end of the campus flicker, their bulbs dying. The two diverge through a thinly-wooded meadow to get to the pavement and walk to their respective flats. Somehow, the two haven’t split up on their walk home yet, and it confuses Fiore. There’s no way they live anywhere near each other. He would have seen him walking around the area at some point.

His shock is amplified when they make their way down the block, and to the flat complex at the other end of the street. Only now, with brick walls to reverberate the sound, could he hear the mans shoes thump against the pavement. He knocks, and the two are let in by the desk woman.

Only when the glass door shuts behind him does he have the ability to actually open his mouth and produce words.

“You live here?” Fiore is in a bit of disbelief. He lives in the same complex, yet he had never noticed this man at any point in his time living here. The man nods, sliding Fiore’s coat off of his frame and handing it back.

“Yeah, I live on the third floor.” His voice lowers again, quiet, that tense-violin-string quality returning to it.

Fiore nods back, tightening his lips. He can’t tell if it looks like a smile or not, but it’s his best attempt.

“So do I,” he adds, his murmur of a voice barely registering to his own ears. He could have been yelling, for all he knew.

The man nods again. Fiore misses his smile.

“We’re neighbors, then. I’m DeBlanc.” He says coolly, looking over Fiore a few times while he decides whether or not to introduce himself. Would he actually see this man again, or would it be entirely pointless to introduce himself to a stranger he’d never see again? He guessed that DeBlanc wouldn’t be a stranger, but he could never tell. Sometimes he’d meet a new person who he believed he’d hit it off with, and after their first encounter he’d never see that person again.

Continuous interaction is tiring, but he decides to bite the bullet and introduce himself, regardless.

“Fiore.” For him, it’s a quite grand introduction. His voice swells a bit in his throat, coming out louder than he’d intended. DeBlanc smiles gently, and he does his tight, straight-lipped gesture back at him.

They pad up the stairs to the third floor, finally reaching the point in their journey where they branch apart. He holds his coat, draped over his arms, and stares down at DeBlanc.

“I hope I’ll see you again. I’d like to hear you talk.” The warmth in his voice makes it obvious that it’s just a joke, but Fiore feels a bit hurt. He tried his best to talk, but conversation has never been his strong suit.

However, he still manages to fuck it up just a bit. He only nods after that, waving goodbye and unlocking the door to his flat. DeBlanc waves goodbye back at him, walking down to the other end of the hall. Fiore watches him duck into his flat before he locks himself up in his own.

The lingering feeling that he’s ruined that interaction sticks with him all night, through his shower and disrupting his sleep. He feels determination to try and make it better, but he also doesn’t want to intrude on DeBlanc’s life. He might as well just wait until DeBlanc comes to him.

In his sleep-deprived haze, he wonders if he should find him tomorrow and try to strike up another conversation. It’s probably a normal thought to most people, but Fiore can’t manage to think through that meeting.

He’s overthinking it. He tosses and turns, finally resting on his side. He reassures himself that they’ll see each other when they see each other, and he doesn’t need to think so hard about it.

**Author's Note:**

> here i come, trying to over-saturate the defiore market. this doesn't have a perfectly constructed plot yet, but i hope this was left in a state where i can just pick it up and go wherever i'd like with it.


End file.
